Viam recently announced a partnership to help power the smart machines made by Tennibot, a company that has created an autonomous tennis assistant. Their namesake machine self-navigates around the tennis court picking up tennis balls so that players don’t have to do it themselves, and can better focus on the game and their technique.
The Tennibot is an illustrative example of the type of smart machine Viam was designed to manage: a device that has some ability to perceive the world through sensors or cameras, and can leverage its compute to take an action in response to its environment.
Tennibot came to Viam at an inflection point in their machine’s development. They were ready to scale up production, but they needed a few key features on their backend to ensure they could:
- Keep all machines at operational and version parity
- Monitor their growing fleet’s health status
- Provide remote diagnostics and remediation for any potential issues
Here’s how Tennibot made their autonomous tennis assistant a viable business with help from Viam’s fleet and data management infrastructure for smart machines.
Current approaches to managing fleets and data can’t scale
Before Viam, Tennibot used a popular cloud platform to manage the data its machines collected and generated. However, since the cloud platform was originally designed to handle data for software and not physical machines, this created a host of additional infrastructural issues.
Getting the data from their machines to the cloud required a series of complex integrations, large new codebases, and constant authentication requests to create what amounted to an improvised, proprietary data management system. The mosaic of solutions worked as an interim fix for immediate needs, but it was also time-consuming and prone to breakdowns that required a lot of extra maintenance work.
There was no way such a system could scale to hundreds of machines, a possibility that was increasingly within reach as Tennibot’s machines started to gain market traction. Taking care of the data management system for the machines progressively began taking time away from being able to work on the machine itself and its capabilities.
At hardware manufacturers and machine-based startups like Tennibot, this tension between machine development and managing fleets and their data becomes a series of resource tradeoffs. At organizations that manage diverse fleets, it usually means toggling between various tools and their data silos in an attempt to reduce visibility gaps.
However, it amounts to the same end: organizations constrained by inflexible legacy infrastructure in their agility to manage machines and their data.
Viam handles machine data management so businesses don’t have to
The Viam platform provides out-of-the-box cloud pipelines designed to easily plug into machines and facilitate their monitoring and management.
Viam’s open-source architecture helped it integrate seamlessly with Tennibot’s machines. The Viam platform abstracts hardware components so that engineers can interact with a machine using high-level commands and simple code through a standardized user interface similar to a typical software platform.
Abstracting the hardware in this way allows engineers to write logic and commands for any machine, without having to sweat the intricate details of hardware implementation and management. That helps break down barriers and silos so that any machine can be interoperable and share data with the cloud and any other machine, regardless of its make or manufacturer.
To facilitate this communication between devices and platforms, Viam’s APIs enable data captured on-machine to be sent to the cloud for synchronization, storage, and analysis, and organizations can then leverage this data to keep tabs on how their fleet is performing as well as take action to remotely diagnose or remediate potential issues with machine functionality.
In the case of Tennibot, Viam allowed them to move away from the stopgap integrations they had used to manage machines and their data through their large cloud storage provider. Right away, this freed up a lot of time that they had previously needed to spend maintaining that system; Viam’s cloud backend gave them a simple way to access crucial fleet data without integration hassles.
Viam’s tight security protocols—including baked-in permissioning, data privacy compliance, and encryption—made constant authentication prompts a thing of the past.
The power of Viam to unite the data that Tennibot’s machines produced and collected enabled the company to:
- Regularly check the health status of their fleet
- Analyze data to see where machine performance could be optimized
- Deploy needed code and other updates to machines to act on the insights the data was giving them
Viam drives efficiency and faster time-to-market
Now that Tennibot is able to capture machine data in a more streamlined way, it is positively impacting their bottom line.
The Viam platform’s infrastructure is designed to scale up to thousands of machines and avoids the pitfalls of resource-intensive integrations between machine middleware and cloud software, which has helped Tennibot to focus more intently on building and testing their latest machine models and getting them into tennis clubs and players’ hands.
Once those machines have shipped, Viam enables Tennibot to analyze machine-generated data, carry out remote diagnostics and remediation, and send code updates to their entire fleet.
As Tennibot CTO Lincoln Wang put it, "Viam makes it simple to check the current status of our machines and deploy code to update them as needed." With that functionality in place, Tennibot was able to accelerate machine manufacture and delivery, get to market faster, and "comfortably expand our fleet to hundreds of robots with full confidence," Wang said.
The Viam platform also provides Tennibot with the infrastructure to create ML models tailored to the data an individual machine collects. The company is currently exploring ways to use Viam together with the machine’s cameras; they hope to train ML models on data collected about the way tennis players swing their racket and provide insight on how to improve their game technique.
Get started with Viam now
What Viam has done to streamline management of Tennibot’s machines, and enhance the business based around them, is accessible to any hardware manufacturer or organization that oversees a heterogenous machine fleet.
The Viam platform is free for developers to use; sign up here to give it a spin. If you’d like a demonstration customized to your worksites and hardware showing how Viam can help your fleet thrive, get in touch with one of our automation experts.
