Vision
The orchestration layer for the Physical AI era
Capable robots are becoming abundant. The question is no longer whether industrial automation works, it's whether it works as one system.
The shift
When robots are everywhere, coordination is everything.
Industrial robotics is at an inflection point. Perception, navigation, and manipulation — the hard problems of the last decade — are being solved at the model and hardware layer. GPU-accelerated AI, simulation-to-real pipelines, and foundation models for robotics are compressing what used to take years into months. Capable robots are becoming widely available across the industry, and fast. For the people running these operations, that changes what the hard problem is.
Today, the automation challenge is often the robot itself: will it work, will it hold up, will it survive a real shift. As the model and hardware layer matures, that question gets easier. The hard part moves up the stack and becomes: how do you run a hundred robots from four vendors across three buildings, alongside people and forklifts and the MES that's been there since 2003 — at three shifts, seven days, no downtime — and have it all behave like one operation? That is a coordination problem. It's what every operations leader will be solving for, in some form, within the next three years.
Every floor, factory or warehouse, is already a real-time constraint-satisfaction problem: thousands of interdependent tasks, shared physical spaces, dynamic dependencies, zero tolerance for unplanned downtime. The layer that solves the automation challenge is the Orchestration System. That is the category Idealworks is building.
Where we're placing our bets
Physical AI, engineered in production
GPU-accelerated perception, simulation-to-real deployment, and foundation models for robotics are reshaping what automation is capable of. We've been engineering on this foundation, building simulation into the deployment workflow, and shipping AI that runs on the floor today.
Coordination is the layer that scales
A capable robot solves one problem. A coordinated fleet across vendors, environments, and production systems solves the operation. That's what determines whether automation expands from a cell to a site to an enterprise, or stalls at a pilot. Idealworks OS is built for that move.
Open standards, because fragmentation doesn't scale
A locked-in fleet caps what orchestration can do. Idealworks co-leads VDA 5050 — the open communication interface between mobile robots and a master control system — because every contribution improves the layer for everyone building on it.
Jimmy Nassif on the physical-AI thesis, orchestration as a platform layer, and why the industry bet is now.
Your factory, in concert
Automation works when the layer above the robots does its job. Robots, people, and systems moving together. Coordinated, not integrated. Conducted, not managed. Everything orchestrated in concert. That's what we're building.
