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Mass Robotics Convention 2025
May 2, 2025
Experience the Mass Robotics Convention in Boston, MA with us as we walk through the expo to see all of the cool new robotic innovations and technology! Mass Robotics Summit and Expo 2025 https://www.massrobotics.org/event/robotics-summit-and-expo-2025/ Shot by Moloney Creative Agency: https://moloneycreativeagency.com/ Mike Moloney Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mjmolo/ Matthew Moloney: https://matthewmoloney.com Matthew Moloney Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moloneymatthew_/ Watch all Matthew Moloney short films: https://www.youtube.com/@mattmoloney_/videos Music Credits: "Auckland" – VYEN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5b1j_zQ1os "Icelandic Arpeggios" – DivKid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxoq8jEGbBo "Instant Crush" – Corbyn Kites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vad0YbV9wm4 "Wander" – Emmit Fenn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1PKVhk_bvU
View Video Transcript
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have one part of that plant.
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[Music] Any questions
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about that? echoes on that screen.
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[Music] Also give you a quick demo. We are zero
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error. Zero error means zero error motion control. We specialize in design, development and manufacturing of the
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rotary accurators. Our road reactors is composed by single core components
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including the servo driver, servo motors, few absolute encoders, friction brake, electric torque sensors, string
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wave gears also known as the harmonic drives and all these core components are
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integrated in one actual unit. The accurators like this
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one and we also are pleased to show you
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this layer by layer structure. same product and a more direct view of what's
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happening [Music]
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Heat. Heat.
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[Music]
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Heat. [Music]
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So the next [Music] position's position.
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[Music]
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[Music] Thank [Music]
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you. Thank you for
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Hi, I'm Mike from Airline. I'm here at the Boston Robotics Summit uh 2025. And
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uh what we're showing today is I'm actually sharing the SMC booth with an Omron collaborative robot. We're using
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SMC grippers to actually do a small pick and place application. As you can see with the boxes, we're basically sorting
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them from one side to the other. The Omron robot has a lot of great features with included vision um included
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programming that goes with it, the ability to do arrays and other um methods of programming. It has unique
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features of a landmark which can help it to help you with location so you're not using your zero reference coming from
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the base. So if you have any questions and you like to do, you can contact airline at airlinehide.com
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uh and schedule a trip with our tech traveler. We can come and bring the the technology to you.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Look at
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this. [Music]
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Right. lot of what we're doing, testing, taking your technology.
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It really helps my new
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[Music]
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friends. So they do a lot of like front end work. My name is Danielle. I'm
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co-founder at Fresco Design. We're a design consultancy based outside of Boston. We help client companies through
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product development. So, we go from early concept design through to design for manufacturing. Um, a lot of the
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products that we work with have to consider human factors and ergonomics. So, you'll see a lot of products that
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are worn on the head or over here that it's sat in, right? A lot of the
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products we're we're designing across industries, whether it's medical or wearables or the consumer space, it has
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to interact with the human body. Um, a lot of our clients are also bringing new
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technologies to the world and maybe productizing something for the first time. So, we help them say, how do you
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take a new technology, design it for a product with a really like wonderful user experience so that it's going to be
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adopted by the consumer? A great example of that is um this is work we did for one of our
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clients, Nurible. They do uh brain consumer interface technology. So their
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technology uh senses your brain waves and it helps you detect when you're focused and when you're being
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distracted. So they wanted to take this technology into a consumer product. So
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we help them in that process integrate their technology into consumer
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headphones. So a big part of that effort was how do you take the sensors and
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integrate it into a form factor which can be designed for a product that can
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be consoled on the mark consumer market. So these are actually
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um uh conductive fibers that are woven into ear cushions that are connected to
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the technology which is inside of the housing. Part of our process as we're
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designing is prototyping. So we want to understand how a product is going to look, how it's going to feel. This is an
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appearance prototype. Um but it can be worn so that you can test and understand
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like form factor, what it feels like, what it looks like. We help them really derisk this
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product in the design for manufacturing process. So they could take that technology and go to um headphone
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companies and say would you like to partner with us? So their technology is now integrated into the master and
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dynamic headphone which has amazing audio and sound. Um so you can now you
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know you can now buy this technology in a product that you're going to wear every day as a consumer.
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[Music] Um another example of work we do I mentioned
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prototyping. It's a huge part of the design process. So, as we're solving
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design problems, we need to test and iterate constantly. This is an example
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of an appearance prototype. So, this is all um 3D printed SLA parts, including
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the mesh here that's inside of the helmet. An appearance prototype is what
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helps our team and our client teams make design decisions and understand what direction they want to take a product
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into. We also do a lot of working prototypes. prototypes that are going to be used for field testing and user
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testing. And this is all part of the design evolution as we're designing for the final manufacturing intent of a
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product. Um, so that's a lot of fresco in a nutshell. Um, one more thing I'll
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mention is when we're designing these products, we're saying how do you how do you show
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your customer the technology that you've taken years to develop? How do you like
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convey that technology in a really like easy to understand and easy to digest
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format? So, our team of 3D visualization artists, we bring a lot of technology to
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life um in 3D with technical animations that
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showcase how a product works, how a technology works. And this is a way for
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um our clients to present their technology whether it's consumerf facing
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or for an investor pitch or internal stakeholders. So it's part of the the
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product journey is that final storytelling of what your technology can do.
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Hi, I'm Gustavo Fontana. I'm one of the co-founders of Fresco. Thank you for coming to our booth today. Uh I'd like
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to tell you a little bit more about our culture. Why Fresco? Um my background is
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in product development, industrial design. I was working in advanced development in the corporate side. I did that for quite a bit. And when I would
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look for a design company, it was very hard to find the right mixture of front- end creativity, but also follow with a
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lot of uh execution, high quality design for manufacturing knowhow and then also
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be very good about fast adoration to let our clients know and show them the way
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of different ways of how to be more creative, right? And this is where we started Fresco. Uh we're a small
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company. We're only 15 people in in three offices and our approach is really
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uh working with a very senior team, very hands-on. Our average experience is 13
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years for the entire team and our our goal is to be an embedded augmented part
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of the in-house design teams of a small startup or large corporations. So we tend to be instead of this outside
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company that works sending things over the wall be much more involved in the day-to-day decisions of why and how we
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use design and then how to bring that design into something that is delightful
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for users that works well that has been tested and evolved every day and as we
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do that also that starts meeting all your business goals it starts meeting all your goals of quality of
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manufacturing and I'm sorry manufacturing reliability and and also it's easy for the consumer
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to understand. Um our background tends to be in terms of the type of products and projects we do study more with the
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consumer and consumer electronics but we really have an act for things that people wear things that
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people interact with that they need to grip that they need to put on their heads they need to put on the on the
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bodies. Though I would say human factors becomes like a natural extension of the
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areas of excellence of fresco and we get to do that through a lot of as you can
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see we have a lot of uh dummies of all different sizes of people different sizes inside elements such as ears only
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of of noses only of you know shoulder width only and depends on what kind of
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product you're working with we're going to help you in those directions and the prototyping We take them from
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the very rough and daily printouts. Uh we get to the point that uh we got over
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25 printers in our studio. So we print every day and every night just to kind of see where design is at. And besides
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that, we also do very finished things like uh you can see here finished level appearance prototypes. That's the level
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of prototyping that tends to be a bit of a dying arts because people rely a lot in computer renderings, but they don't
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get to have the visceral connection to how a material starts feeling or how a
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color way really works out in real life until you start doing it. Funny part about this when we do a CMF study which
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is color material and finishes and we do it only in the tube and we do it first
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virtually in renderings which are really good about doing that. As you can see some of the rendering exercises, a lot
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of the colors and that we choose when we start ordering those paints and painting them, they don't look as we expected.
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So, there's a lot of iteration that we start doing mixing paints, uh, repainting, rematching until we get it
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right. So, it's a very hands-on process. A lot of our clients come to a model shop and paint room right in Malbero. Uh
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because if you have someone doing that far away overseas or across the world, uh you're not going to be able to say,
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"Ah, that's not the red that I wanted or that green. It just looks a little bit dead and I wanted something more vivid."
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So, we can do the level of iteration and care to really get you to the finishes
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and colors and impact that you want when you're doing something for, you know, visual stunning differentiation.
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[Music]
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Yeah, it's actually funny. Let me say that. Yes.
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[Music] Yeah. [Music]
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Some people try to [Music]
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make
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it. I remember choosing their color.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Hold on. [Music]
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Hi everyone. U we are here at the robotics summit for 2025 in Boston. Uh
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what we have here is a virtual factory digital twin demo where uh QX is
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essentially the brain that's running your robotic system. And uh in terms of what's happening here
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is uh we have a virtual factory digital twin demo where the QX real-time operating
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system powers the flexive robot and we're essentially also having a digital
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twin that's running on Unity engine and the Unity engine which shows the whole
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virtual factory is also running on a QX uh realtime operating system Through our
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general embedded software development platform, QX is essentially enabling a
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lot of robotics applications which power very high complex applications across
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different industries. I can quickly show you a demo here where uh the real time operating system
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essentially is helping you mimic what's happening in the physical digital world
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and showing how that could operate within a virtual factory setting.
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So as I pick up things from the robotic arm
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and move along things on the right side. What we have
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here is the same robot arm setting within a virtual
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factory setting that is between a production and production line. So we
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have different use cases here. uh weptic and uh place robot but but in terms of how
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this uh optimizes and accelerates embedded software development is is the one that's
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powering safety and and any kind of safety critical embedded software
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applications within robotics. Thank you again.
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Okay. So, here's the pick and place.
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Uh there's also another mode. Uh just this is the eight.
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[Music]
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To build any software defined embedded system, it's very obvious that you need software, you need uh hardware and also
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development tools to put the software and hardware together but you but
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today's software defined embedded systems are very complex and they need to be safe and secure so you need an
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efficient tools to put them together and this embedded robotic systems have to safely communicate with each other so
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for those reasons we have QX general embedded development platform and if you
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see here we provide not only uh like uh just the OS and the hypervisor we
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provide the entire software framework network and also a starting application so that you can accelerate the building
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of your software defined embedded system. So in this particular thing the only software component that's tied to
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the hardware is the board support package and also the drivers here and our software runs in an x86 processor or
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an ARM processor and it can run on the cloud or in the production hardware. So
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you don't need to wait uh so that for your development of your uh software for
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building your device you can start off on any hardware end because most of the software above this board support
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package is completely software defined you should be able to migrate from one system to the other we also provide a
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jump start application when I say jump start application a starting application as a hello world application and we have
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the virtual factory demo that is a also a jump start application for us to build
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robotics. Uh let me show some of the middleware
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components we have here. We have uh the sensor framework which is used to
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connect the cameras, the light, radars. It can be used for uh autonomous
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applications, auton autonomous functionality and we have different uh frameworks for user interfaces. We are
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going to see more about that in the demo. uh we have rich user interfaces 3D augmented reality which we are
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showcasing there and the other framework here is the security framework every device
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needs to have a birth certificate and we provide a birth certificate to the
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extent you can every subsystem can be authenticated to and along with it we
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can have a code signing which can be quantum resistant to so that it cannot
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break by quantum computers And we also have a software defined audio so that
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whenever you have audio you can have a system level audio development that you can do. Audio seems
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uh like a is a necessary component that when you're building humanoids it can be also used not only for your sound but
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also can be used for sensing applications. uh in one of the humanoid robots I've seen uh they are planning to
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use more than 16 microphones because microphones are omniirectional you can
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do that for sensing different kinds of sensing applications so with this particular uh we are we support a lot of
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open source components too like Ross 2 like KDL which is a inverse kinaptics
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for uh robotic systems there are several open source components we support and the software itself is positive
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compliant and open but the the quick takeaway is you have most of the
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software is the platform that is given so that you can accelerate the building of this uh devices. So let's go and see
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and uh these are the development tools we talked about. We provide pre-certified software. When we say
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prescertified software, you can show this as an evidence when you are certifying your whole system. And using
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this approach, you can save more than a year or up to 18 months of certification
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efforts. Shall we go and see the demo? Okay, Matt. So we we've seen uh the
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stack there general embedded development platform which accelerates uh the building of your softwaredefined
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robotics or software defined embedded systems for any industry and we also said that we provide not only the
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foundational components safety certified components but we also provide a a starting uh application so that you can
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start off from that applications to build your own uh innovative product. So this is an example of such uh particular
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starting applications called the virtual factory demo. What we are showcasing is QNXC is running on this single Intel box
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which has got on a single multi-core SOC which is a 12 core here. And what we are
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doing is and the bottom box that you have here is a robotic controller. That robotic controller is just a black box
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here in this case which actually is controlling the seven degrees of freedom that this robotic arm has. That means
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there are seven motors here that are running here. So and all the application that the use
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case that needs to be done is running on that single embedded Intel box. So what
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is what are we running here? We are running the Unity 3D. This entire virtual factory demo is running on that
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particular one single SOC. Not only that, we are showing a digital twin of
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this particular robotic arm. And if you see this is the space mouse I have here the mouse to move it and you can see in
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real time it's almost very realistic model. There's no camera here. So we have a 3D
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model running natively on a hard realtime operating system which has got a very ultra low latency uh like timing
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requirements like that means in some of these robotics you need to have feedback because these robots when they interact
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with the human beings without any fences or guard rails they need to have a force feedback that means the more the
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immediately you feel any force that it's trying to crush or something it has to stop by itself for that reason this has
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to be continuously monitored So our software is able to continuously monitor that it is otherwise this robotic arm
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will not function. Okay, that is one main thing while doing that high speeded operations of monitoring for the force
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feedback for safety. It is also doing the unity 3D on the same thing. So you can also now that you have a multi-core
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SOC you can have the safety controller. You see here the stop button here. In a typical factory you have a safety
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controller externally on an assembly line and if something goes wrong from different machines it automatically
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stops the assembly line. But now with the ability to do hardware consolidation
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do many things as a software defined on the same single SOC you can actually have that safety controller also running
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on the same box. So no more need to actually have those wires moving
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everywhere. If you have introduced a new industrial controller, you need to draw a new line again back to that safety
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controller. But now when you define software define this safety controller, you can actually have a software defined
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signal itself as your new adaptable assembly line. So it it
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accelerates innovation for you. So we are running Unity and what else we are doing? We are having this uh aruko
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augmented reality tag based things. Each one is each tag is marked as red, green
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or blue. And if you see here in real time we have a camera
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here. in real time we are able to see this and we use an open source component
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called OpenCV and based on this we are painting that green square on the screen
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and this demo I can even uh maybe let's say show you uh zoom it up is it getting
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lengthier for you or is that okay
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And the other thing is other feature of this is you also have a hypervisor running on
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the same system. So with that we are running a Ubuntu guest [Music]
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here. This is an Ubuntu guest. It is called Arvis. It is a ROSS visualizer.
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Ross is a communication that is open source communication that is used to uh is based on a publish subscriber
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interface protocol so that you can uh send commands to control and manage the robotic systems. It's not only seeing
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the native camera vision we also can see send that command again and we can also say visualize in the RV world too.
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The fact here is like we are running the hypervisor running a Linux gu running on top of a a QX based system.
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Yeah. And other aspect of it is is the what the mixed reality aspect of it. If you
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see that you have a a blue, red and a green zone here, but that blue, red and
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green zone are not on the in the physical world.
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So you can use like your space mouse here. The space mouse is sending the
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commands to the robotic controller and it is and those commands
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are used to place your object that it is being seen. This is a virtual cube is actually being placed in those zones and
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for the gamification purpose when it is when the cubes are placed the colored cubes are placed in the colored in the
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proper zones the yellow cube starts on those three conveyor belt. And once it starts, we are just showing here the
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amount of processing that you can do. And this is a gamification part of it.
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And now this is a virtual robot completely virtual robot. Uh it's nothing. We detached it from the
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physical robot. So the significance of it is you don't even need to have this
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expensive physical robot to start your application. You can actually start with that because the command that you send
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to the robot or robotic arm or this physical is the same. It does not matter
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once you get your application everything working there you should be able to put it here and everything works so there
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will be no surprises at all and that virtual robot now that this one is running on this particular target itself
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here locally here but I can get a digital twin of the same thing running in the cloud so that you can have any
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number of those like virtual robots or a digital twins of the robotic arms and you can have distributed teams working
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on it and anytime your code is checked in each time you can do get a degree of quality of your code before even you try
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it on the physical hardware which is really very expensive. So the simulation first world we are already there. This
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is an example of simulation first before you can get it. So it enables to accelerate the building of your uh
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devices and uh yeah that's in a nutshell uh is
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something in detail but uh if you have any questions yeah please feel free Matt. Yeah hopefully this will help.
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That was awesome. [Music]