Olis Connect provides remote access to robots

By Karen Hanna 

A robot pouring beer for visitors at Automate 2022 could have raised concerns it had overserved itself as it hit some snags and stopped.  

But the robot’s issues were only an opportunity for 9-year-old technology company Olis Robotics to show off its chops with a remote-monitoring service it calls Olis Connect.  

The plug-and-play service logs all the movements a connected robot makes and sends alerts when there’s a problem, such as an unexpected stoppage. Using cameras, it gives subscribers a way to see what’s gone wrong, just as they might use their doorbell camera to see who’s on their front porch.  

In addition to being able to monitor their robots via a smartphone, users who have any Universal Robots (UR) robot also can control or reset their robot through the same interface — that capability will be extended to robots from other manufacturers this fall, said Olis CEO Fredrik Rydén. 

“We provide you with basically video recordings of what went wrong,” Rydén said. “... You don't have to sift through a bunch of video. We sync it and show you exactly happened 30 seconds before the fault. So now that you have the rich video data that is time-synchronized, and you have the log data, now you have all the information needed to start making those decisions [to restart the robot].” 

Available since March, Olis Connect can be specified by integrators or retrofitted to robots already in operation. 

Established in 2013 to work with big hydraulic-arm robots on offshore platforms near Scotland, Olis has evolved into a company that envisions helping manufacturers to work lights-out.  

While robots often come with remote-data-collection capabilities, their built-in error-tracking systems usually provide information only when the robot itself needs maintenance. But most issues that force a robot to stop don’t involve its mechanical or electronics systems at all, Rydén said. 

That reality means Olis’ customers — mostly integrators — often had to drop everything to fix problems that weren’t terribly technical. 

“They are constantly traveling on these jobs, where, at the end of the day, it’s a simple fix that could have been done remotely, and they just wasted a day, maybe $5,000 of their customer’s money. And they could have spent that [day] working on a new project or getting more customers or something like that,” Rydén said. “... I think there's some opportunity here to basically just become twice as productive.” 

By providing video of what’s happening, Rydén said Olis Connect gives users a more efficient way to diagnose problems.  

“The reality is that the vast majority of stoppages of these machines are very trivial for people to fix, and they're usually fixed by people in 30 seconds by effectively hitting restart or changing a point slightly or something like that,” he said.