German Bionic Launches Over-the-Air Updates for Exoskeleton
May 10, 2021
German Bionic, which manufactures smart power suits for industrial applications, has announced that functional updates can be performed via wireless remote transmission. The German Bionic OS, which connects the power suits to the cloud, makes this possible, the Augsburg, Germany-based company said in a statement.
“We know from our customers and partners in the logistics area that exoskeletons are significantly more flexible than any other existing tool when it comes to manual handling,” said Norma Steller, head of IoT at German Bionic. “To make the power suits even smarter and therefore even more adaptable for all employees and the workplace, we connect them via our cloud to Smart Factory interfaces. By means of ‘over-the-air’ software updates, we can modify the exoskeleton and thereby enable new use cases.”
The Cray X exoskeleton now interprets the user’s movements with greater precision and learns how to best respond to the user’s movements. “We are making over-the-air functionality a standard in robotics,” said Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of German Bionic. “In the future, our exoskeletons will effectively continue to get a little bit better with every update.” Machine learning occurs in real-time in the German Bionic cloud, allowing the Cray X to be continuously trained and better adapted to the user and their workplace with each work session.
German Bionic is backed by investors such as the Samsung Catalyst Fund, Storm Ventures, and MIG, which also invested in COVID-19 vaccine developer BioNTech. The Cray X exoskeleton self-learns to reinforce lifting movements and prevent incorrect posture, becoming an intelligent link between humans and machines in logistics and intralogistics processes. The system then can deliver data to protect the health of workers, reduce the risk of accidents, and make quantifiable improvements to work processes. Late last year, the company raised $20 million in Series A funding.
More details on the company and its technology can be found here.
