Mantis Robotics Arm Gets Fenceless Safety Certification

- The Mantis MR-1 robot arm has a 5kg payload, a 900mm reach, and can operate at speeds up to 10 m/s. This is significantly faster than typical collaborative robots, which often operate at much lower speeds to ensure safety when working alongside humans. - The certification to ISO 10218 and ISO 13849 standards is crucial because these standards define safety requirements for industrial robots and their control systems. ISO 10218 focuses on the robot's design and integration, while ISO 13849 provides guidance on the design of safety-related control systems, ensuring high reliability. - Mantis Robotics calls its technology "Physical AI," which uses a proprietary sensor suite to give the robot 3D spatial awareness. This allows the MR-1 to perceive its environment and adjust its motion in real-time to avoid collisions with moving objects and people, eliminating the need for traditional safety fences. - The company, founded in 2020, has raised a total of $12.2M. Its investors include the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Emerald Technology Ventures, signaling confidence in its approach to human-robot collaboration. - A key market advantage of fenceless robots is the significant reduction in factory floor footprint. An industrial robot with safety fencing can require at least four times the space of a fenceless robot like the MR-1, which can be deployed in the same footprint as a human worker. - The MR-1 is programmed using a code-free environment called Mantis Studio, which features a real-time 3D digital twin. This allows for rapid deployment and simulation of tasks without needing specialized robotics programming experience.