Wandlebots on the future of robot programming

The Robot Report Podcast · 13 Mar 2025 · 59m

AI in practice: 3 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Fabio Gehrlicher, Director of Market Expansion at Wandelbots, explains how their flagship product, Wandelbots NOVA, serves as an agnostic operating system for industrial robots, simplifying programming through a unified interface and Python-based scripting. The conversation details the integration of AI for smart path planning and the critical 'sim-to-real' workflow, where digital twins in NVIDIA Isaac Sim allow for validation before deployment to physical hardware. Gehrlicher highlights the company's expansion into the US market and their upcoming showcase at ProMat 2023, while the hosts discuss industry news including Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models and the financial struggles of iRobot.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationWandelbots NOVA (AI path planning)

The system uses AI to analyze collected real-world data to optimize and plan robot paths more efficiently, particularly for high-mix production scenarios.

“So what we use AI for is, of course, like collecting data and and feed that into Nova so that, um, for example, when when it comes to path optimization and path planning that we can use AI to plan these paths even more efficiently, especially when it's like high, high mix, low volume, for example, right? Or high mix, high volume, it doesn't really matter where you have like to change your workpieces, many, many times.”

Fabio Gehrlicher · Hear it at 35:43

Engineering & simulationWandelbots NOVA (AI integration)saving €20,000,000 every single day

AI was applied to path generation to help a customer reach a specific cycle time target of 14 seconds, saving them significant daily revenue.

“We put we put AI on the the path generation, we created the path that's a little bit different. We did reachability studies so that we knew where to mount the robots correctly and we did like cycle time estimations, right? So that was 2 weeks of work. And it was saving them €20000000 Every single day. That's a real ROI. That is a…”

Fabio Gehrlicher · Hear it at 46:21

Engineering & simulationWandelbots NOVA (Sanding App)

AI collects data on materials and equipment to automatically generate parameters for a sanding application, allowing non-programmers to create robot paths via a button click.

“And then have all the parameters already there because AI is collecting the data of different uh materials of different uh sending uh equipment you use. And then it's another simple click on a button, which is basically start. And it's done. So in this case, for the end user of this app that is based on Nova, there is no coding required.”

Fabio Gehrlicher · Hear it at 49:08

Mentioned

Companies
Wandelbots, Google DeepMind, iRobot, ABB, Fanuc, KUKA
Products
Wandelbots NOVA, Gemini Robotics
Tools
NVIDIA Isaac Sim, ROS
Also
ProMat 2023

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