SCUTTLE and Viam unlock advancements in mobile robotics

We’re working together to bridge gaps in mobile robotics education and innovation, enabling academics and companies alike to develop extensible mobile robots faster than ever.

SCUTTLE and Viam team up to unlock advancements in mobile robotics - YouTube

SCUTTLE and Viam team up to unlock advancements in mobile robotics

Viam makes it easy for users of the SCUTTLE mobile platform to configure robotics hardware, control fleets, and execute advanced tasks like SLAM and ML.

Easy hardware configuration

No code is needed to configure common robotic components like bases, boards, and motors.

Cloud-based control

Viam provides fleet management and data management capabilities for SCUTTLE robots.

Open source & extensible

Exposed APIs and reusable configurations make extending SCUTTLE robots a breeze.

“Viam provides a common interface for all the different specialties in robotics, and that’s freeing. For example, a mechanical expert can decouple their development efforts from another expert’s. That gives you so much more room to develop quickly and trust that you can reintegrate what you’ve made.”
—David Malawey, SCUTTLE Robotics LLC Founder

THE PROBLEM

“Continuity from education to industry is a problem for robotics across the board. We need industrial players to trust that students are learning something valuable and workable in the industry.”

The world of mobile robotics is evolving at an unprecedented rate, causing an influx of hardware and software tools for building novel mobile robots. However, these vast resources also present a challenge: the absence of continuity and modularity in integrating these tools, which in turn hinders pathways to desired robotics outcomes.

Students in educational settings who dive deep into these tools and methods often find that what they've learned isn't directly applicable in the professional realm. This mismatch creates barriers to entry for budding robotics engineers. SCUTTLE emerged as a solution to this challenge, offering an affordable, versatile, and open-source mobile robotics hardware platform that flexibly supports both research and commercial applications.

As the SCUTTLE ecosystem evolved, the same challenges emerged for the community on the software side, bringing the SCUTTLE Robotics team to look for a complementary and modular software framework.

THE SOLUTION

“Viam enables continuity for robotics software. And that allows the students and professionals to say, I can trust that this ecosystem will connect me to all the key tools to do any robotics outcome.”

Enter Viam, a champion of the open-source ecosystem for robotics software, mirroring SCUTTLE's philosophy for hardware. While SCUTTLE enables modularity for mobile robotics, Viam works in tandem to streamline robotics software.

Students and engineers alike can now trust this combined ecosystem to provide all the essential tools needed to achieve any robotics goal in an extensible and flexible manner. With Viam's integration on a SCUTTLE robot, hardware configuration and control software become accessible and straightforward processes.

• Viam allows users to swiftly configure SCUTTLE robot hardware, sometimes in as little as 10 minutes, and then program SCUTTLE robots in their preferred language.
• Users can employ reusable configurations (such as this SCUTTLE fragment) and Viam modular resources for modular development and extensible design.
• Users can also leverage built-in Viam services to execute higher-level robotics tasks like motion planning, SLAM, and ML.

THE IMPACT

“On the business side, engineers and developers need the freedom to develop independently and create what they have in mind without constant check-ins with other teams. And that’s really important for businesses to scale.”

The collaboration between SCUTTLE and Viam is more than just a partnership; it's the union of two visions that aim to redefine freedom in robotics. This freedom allows students, robotics engineers, and other specialists to work independently and make changes with the assurance that they will seamlessly integrate into the larger system.

It's a transformative approach that fosters rapid development and innovation in both research and industry settings.

• SCUTTLE and Viam offer a common interface for developing mobile robots, ensuring different robotics specialties can cohesively work together.
• Teams of various backgrounds can build mobile robots with unparalleled flexibility and extensibility, allowing institutions and companies to innovate at an accelerated pace.
• The SCUTTLE and Viam ecosystem supports a wide range of indoor use cases, such as utilizing SLAM in sectors like agriculture for plant maintenance or healthcare for sanitizing spaces.

Ready to build with SCUTTLE and Viam?

Learn more about the SCUTTLE mobile platform website and check out our tutorial for quickly configuring a SCUTTLE robot.