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Viam is a software tool for developing robotic software with all of the cloud services necessary to build quickly and begin prototyping your robotic solution. The company is providing roboticists with a robust software development tool that is built for the rigors of real-world applications. Viam is a standard protocol for programming any robot, supporting development at every step, from prototype to production. 

“With innovation slowed down by the high time and resource costs for development, we felt that there was a significant opportunity to do something incredibly important,” said Eliot Horowitz, founder and CEO of Viam. “Robotics can help improve so many industries, from agriculture to food service, to medicine and climate solutions, but we need to break down barriers of working with robotics.”

Horowitz brings real credibility to the company, as his roots are in enterprise cloud computing earned during his tenure as the CTO and co-founder of MongoDB. MongoDB is a source-available, cross-platform, secure, high-availability cloud database solution that is integrated into a number of enterprise applications used every day by millions of users.

In 2020, Horowitz established Viam Robotics with the intent of establishing a similarly designed platform for robotic development. He foresaw the need for a solution based on safe and performant cloud-computing principles as robotics progressed from point solutions to connected swarms of mobile robots and cloud-monitored solutions.

Compute workloads for robotics need to be balanced between the edge and the cloud, and the company seeks to provide a platform that abstracts the low-level software infrastructure. 

Viam enables you to

• Prototype quickly: Robot configuration is simple with any hardware and programming language.‍
• Start production: Managing robot fleets and data on the same platform speeds up development.

These features are built into the Viam software and are taken care of by Viam:

• Data Management: Capture and sync data to the cloud, then view, sort, delete, or export data.
• Machine Learning: Use the data from your robots to train new machine learning models, upload old models, and send models to your robots. ‍
• Fleet Management: Take care of groups of robots or other devices, handle any robot from a distance, and keep them safe with locations, groups, and permissions.‍
• Use other built-in robotics services like Motion, SLAM, and Vision (object detection, picture classification, and image segmentation) to your advantage.‍

‍The Viam platform is dedicated to being open-source and flexible: 

• Everything on the robot, Viam’s RDK and SDKs, is open source.‍
• Modular components let any creator make a custom component or service that, once set up, works just like a resource that came with the program.
• When the Viam community registry comes out, developers will be able to build, program, co-develop, improve, and share components and services on a registry run by Viam.

Learn more about Viam in this article: https://www.viam.com/post/the-road-to-the-future-is-paved-with-viam 

You can also listen to the interview with Eliot Horowitz on The Robot Report Podcast, Episode 96.

Viam is a 2023 RBR50 Innovation honoree for its cloud-based robotics development platform.

Eliot Horowitz will be a presenter at the upcoming Robotics Summit and Expo in Boston on May 10-11, 2023.