How Tennibot leveraged Viam to modernize and scale its robotic business

50%

faster time-to-market through Viam's streamlined prototyping and deployment workflows.

90%

less time spent on software updates with Viam's over-the-air capabilities.

6x

faster production scaling with Viam's simplified hardware integration.

The challenge

Expanding operations while continuing to ensure fleet reliability

Tennibot, a robotics and AI startup, is transforming racket sports training with its groundbreaking devices. Its flagship product was the world’s first and only autonomous tennis ball collection machine. Building on this success, Tennibot introduced The Partner, a ball machine that autonomously navigates the court and adjusts shots to a player’s real-time position. This innovative functionality provides a dynamic, adaptive practice experience, replicating the variability of playing with a human partner. The Partner has quickly become a sought-after training tool among tennis enthusiasts and professionals, gaining popularity at clubs across the United States. To meet growing demand, Tennibot partnered with Viam to streamline production, enhance fleet performance monitoring, and simplify software updates. With Viam’s support, Tennibot is scaling operations while driving innovation in the competitive tennis market.

As Tennibot gained momentum in the marketplace, they faced critical challenges in expanding their business:

• Operational parity: Keeping every machine updated with the latest software.
• Machine monitoring and management: Tracking machine performance and diagnosing issues remotely.
• Efficient updates: Streamlining over-the-air updates for rapid improvements and bug fixes.
• Scalability: Expanding production while maintaining high quality standards.

Their existing patchwork solution for data management—built on a generic cloud platform—was unreliable, resource-intensive, and unsuited for physical machine operations. 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. This bottleneck hindered Tennibot's ability to scale effectively.

the solution

Plug-and-play fleet management with Viam

Tennibot’s robots are illustrative examples 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.

The Viam platform provides out-of-the-box cloud pipelines designed to easily plug into machines and facilitate their monitoring and management, even remotely. Using the Viam platform provided Tennibot with the tools to address their machine fleet and data management challenges, including:

• Streamlined code deployment: Viam’s cloud pipelines allowed Tennibot to update all machines simultaneously, ensuring consistent performance across the fleet.
• Comprehensive fleet monitoring: Diagnostic tools provided actionable insights to optimize machine performance.
• Rapid integration: Viam’s hardware-agnostic APIs allowed Tennibot to seamlessly transition from their homemade backend system to a more consistently reliable backend.
• Scalability: Viam’s infrastructure enabled Tennibot to expand from prototypes to a fully operational fleet without compromising quality.

the outcome

Enhanced efficiency and accelerated business growth

Tennibot made their autonomous tennis assistant a viable business with help from Viam’s fleet and data management infrastructure for smart machines.

The Viam platform 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.

Key achievements of Tennibot’s partnership with Viam:

By leveraging Viam, Tennibot achieved significant milestones:

• Accelerated product development: Viam's platform enabled a 50% reduction in time-to-market for new products through streamlined prototyping, testing, and deployment processes, including adaptations of their flagship tennis machine for pickleball and padel.
• Rapid fleet expansion: With Viam’s simplified workflows and robust hardware integration, Tennibot seamlessly scaled from a handful of machines to over 150 robots in the field, with plans for continued growth.
• Optimized software updates: By leveraging Viam's over-the-air update capabilities, Tennibot reduced the time spent deploying software updates by 90%, enhancing efficiency.
• Improved machine performance: Enhanced machine reliability through real-time data monitoring and remote troubleshooting.

Future plans include further incorporation of AI and ML model integration to enhance machine camera capabilities and provide deeper insights into player performance. By harnessing Viam’s innovative platform, Tennibot is not only optimizing tennis practice, but also setting a new standard for smart sports technology.