Industries

May 1, 2025

AI in action: How our UBS Arena wine-pouring robot demonstrates the future of physical intelligence

Deploying AI in real-world settings with speed and flexibility

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Simone Kalmakis

VP of Engineering

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Our recent wine pouring demo at UBS Arena illustrates how our platform makes it possible to deploy AI in real-world settings with speed and flexibility.

Deploying AI in the physical world at unprecedented speed

The Viam platform allows us to build solutions that perceive and respond to their environment in real-time. This demo showcases a system easily built on Viam in which hardware dynamically responds to changing conditions, rather than just executing fixed instructions.

Viam's AI-Powered Robotic Arm Shows Real-Time Intelligence at UBS Arena - YouTube

What you're seeing isn't a static sequence repeated identically each time—it's a demonstration of AI operating on the physical world, with the system making real-time decisions and bringing in human collaboration when needed. This platform has broad applicability; for example, imagine smarter factory production lines that predict defects before they happen, automatically recalibrating or triggering human intervention as necessary.

Real-time intelligence in action

You can see the Viam platform's true power when watching it control real hardware, like this robotic arm — similar to those used in warehouses and factories worldwide. This demonstration is designed to show how our platform enables:

• Dynamic perception of its environment: In the wine pouring demo, we use computer vision to identify the position of glasses on the table in real-time, no matter where the user places them.
• Adaptive motion planning: Rather than executing fixed movements, the system calculates safe, optimal paths through space in real-time. This is a complex operation given that the robotic arm contains 6 independent joints, each of whose position is determined for each point along the path. These motion plans are computed dynamically given the position of the glasses at that time.
• The Viam platform takes care of this intelligence for you, so that a developer building on Viam does not have to know about motion planning. On the other hand, the Viam platform is highly modular, so a developer could easily swap in a different motion planner if desired, and this is true for all components and services in the Viam ecosystem.
• Human-in-the-loop interaction: Engineers can easily modify or enhance the system's behavior, making it a truly collaborative technology rather than a black box.

This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional robotics programming, where each possible scenario must be explicitly coded in advance. Our platform allows the system to perceive, decide, and execute in the moment - bringing true intelligence to physical interactions.

Speed and flexibility by design

What truly sets our approach apart is how quickly we can develop and deploy these capabilities. Our platform was built specifically to accelerate the development of a smart hardware solution from concept to implementation, allowing us to:

• Integrate with virtually any hardware
• Deploy AI models that work with real-world inputs
• Runnable on anything from edge devices to powerful machines, even with intermittent connectivity
• Make changes and improvements in days rather than months
• Scale solutions across different environments

Using these platform capabilities allowed our internal team to build this demo in days, not months.

The power of a platform approach

Traditional robotics approaches typically create rigid, single-purpose solutions that can't easily adapt to new requirements. Our platform approach completely transforms this paradigm, allowing rapid innovation and flexible deployment.

The wine pouring demo is just one example of how Viam is helping organizations manage the transformative change that comes with AI by providing a universal engineering platform that brings together hardware and software.

Looking forward

Each robotics demonstration we build is designed to highlight our platform's capabilities. We've built a platform that makes it easier than ever to develop sophisticated applications that bridge the digital and physical worlds.

Think of marine vessels using these same capabilities to identify and guide captains toward clusters of fish based on sonar data, or alerting store managers when their displays run out of product. Imagine using laser coordinates to provide visual QA on car assembly lines to accurately predict when manual intervention is needed.

What excites me most about Viam is watching our customers use data and AI to transform how they interact with the physical world. Our demo at UBS Arena shows what's possible when we make intelligence accessible in a real-world environment.