FANUC has announced an enhancement of its Physical AI Robot System through a strategic collaboration with Google, as part of its initiative to accelerate automation by advancing open platforms and Physical AI capabilities. As part of the collaboration, FANUC has developed a Physical AI system for industrial robots that incorporates the latest innovations from Google Cloud, including Gemini Enterprise – an enterprise-grade generative AI with robust security.
‘Physical AI’ is the integration of cognitive intelligence with physical action. This includes robots that can perceive their environment through sensors, make autonomous decisions and execute tasks accordingly. FANUC robots support ROS – the industry standard open platform for robot control – of which Google is a prominent contributor and maintainer through their Intrinsic robotics AI group. FANUC’s portfolio also offers broad compatibility with widely used technologies, including the Python programming language for AI development, high speed communication interfaces for external robot control and interfaces that enable easy operation from PLCs.
Since the release of FANUC’s Physical AI system at the International Robot Exhibition last December, customer interest has continued to grow rapidly, with over 1,000 FANUC robots for Physical AI-related applications already shipped. At its New Product Open House Show in May, the company demonstrated a next generation Physical AI Robot System featuring generative AI Gemini, which understands human instructions, recognises objects and autonomously operates FANUC robots to perform assigned tasks. This revolutionary ‘AI-Powered Agent System for Industrial Robots’ enables both collaborative and non-collaborative robots to work together as a single cell based on simple natural language instructions.
In addition, FANUC provides full support for robot control compatible with Intrinsic’s development environment, ‘Flowstate’. Flowstate software is interoperable with ROS and allows for the quick and easy development of highly adaptable AI solutions by leveraging FANUC’s open platform technologies. FANUC is also participating in Google DeepMind’s ‘Gemini Robotics Trusted Tester Program’ to advance AI research on foundational robotics models for AI….
