A Free Version of Cloud-Based Robotics Tool Is Rolling the Market

Viam Robotics has come out with a unique free version of a cloud-based robotics tool

What a lot of people tell me is 'hardware is hard,'" Eliot Horowitz, the Viam Robotics CEO and MongoDB co-founder explains. "I have a really big problem with that statement." Horowitz further describes purchasing a Universal Robotics UR5 robot arm and programming it to play chess. "I don't feel hardware is hard. I think the hardware is not that hard. But if I urge my hardware designer to go develop a thing in three months, it will work." A few days earlier Viam unveiled a cloud-based robotics tool.

The release of a company's public beta version for the robotics platform is an effort to make a sort of one-stop, cloud-based repository for the sorts of tools required to prototype, code, deploy and scale systems. And similarly, like some of the competitors that have sprung up in the past few years, Viam created its system with a kind of hardware agnosticism in mind. But unlike many firms that have focused on a low- or no-code solution designed for non-programmers/roboticists, Horowitz argues that the industry simply is not there. He spots a web design software analogy.

"Dreamweaver was, in some ways, ahead of its time. If you look at Webflow or Squarespace, their approach is the same as what Dreamweaver was following, but Dreamweaver emerged at a time when the backends were not ready for a product of its nature. It was just a product ahead of its time. The e-commerce space was not prepared for no-code. I think robotics lies in the same place. The advantage of a low-code solution, if it worked, would be beneficial. I just feel it is impractical."

The beta version of the service is currently being offered for free. It promises hardware-agnostic cloud-based robotics tools, developer APIs, and enterprise security. On general availability, the company will offer "consumption-based pricing" for the service.