READY Robotics

READY Robotics is a company developing an industrial brand-agnostic operating system (Forge/OS) for industrial robots and automation. The company enables manufacturers to deploy robots to the factory floor through a patented technology platform that combines a programming interface and hardware. With roots in robotics research at John Hopkins University, READY Robotics was founded in 2016 by Benjamin Gibbs (CEO) and Kelleher Guerin (CIO). Originally based in Baltimore, Maryland, the company moved its headquarters to Columbus, Ohio, in 2018.

Forge O/S is a drag-and-drop flowchart programming interface for controlling and automating robots. It provides a common operating system for use across many robotic brands, such as Yaskawa, Fanuc, Universal Robots, ABB, and Kuka. The Forge O/S platform allows users to control every component of industrial robots, peripherals, PLCs, and machine tools. Forge/OS 5 now supports custom third-party apps to enable OEMs and developers to create apps specifically designed for their processes.

Forge/OS comes with native apps to improve productivity and efficiency. These include the following:

Task Canvas is the user interface for robotic automation made by READY Robotics. It is a drag-and-drop, flowchart-based, touchscreen interface that does not require users to have coding experience to program robotic automation workflows. READY Robotics claims it takes two days of in-depth training to get users fully trained on how to use Task Canvas for programming robotic automation tasks.

This allows users to select and configure devices, access settings, visualize movement, and provide joint position data.

This tool adds new hardware to the user's robotic workcell, with pre-configured support for 250+ industrial and collaborative robots.

With Forge/OS 5, READY Robotics launched Forge SDK a Qt and C++ based platform for developers to build apps that scale across robot brands, peripheral hardware, and software. READY Robotics claims users who are comfortable with C++, Qt, C#, and Python will be productive straight away designing Apps with Forge SDK.

On November 11th, 2016, READY Robotics announced a further $2M in funding, bringing its total seed funding to $3.5M. Investors included Sagamore Ventures, RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Emerald Development Managers. In December 2017, Ready Robotics announced $15M in Series A funding from investors RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Drive Capital. On February 25th, 2020, the company closed a Series B round with $23M in additional funds. The round was led by Canaan Partners, with participation from RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Emerald Development Managers, and Drive Capital, as well as new investors Micron Ventures and Greenhawk Capital.