isento GmbH: A Robot for Every Household

We are on the brink of a robotic revolution. Our daily lives, work lives, and private lives will be influenced in the future through robotics. Currently, we have simple helpers at home. We have dishwashers, washing machines, we have a device that helps us hoovering our living rooms. Some people have stuff in the garden that cuts grass. “My firm belief is that in future we will have support robots that can take over daily business tasks,” said Baier. “In my personal dream they can find my keys and make my morning coffee, and when I come home from work, the kitchen is clean and everything is in its place. We want to lead and shape the development towards this idea.” Until then, the time until PIB is able to take over many household tasks depends on the community. Baier added, “If people continue to join our community and contribute, it will be possible to have a PIB that is actually a reasonable member of a family or household within a few years.”

Onshape benefit 1: Universal access

There’s a wide variety of skill sets brought together with the PIB community project, and not everyone has experience using computer-aided design software. And that’s why PTC is CAD solution, Onshape, is the ideal solution due to its interface and ease of use technology. There are really three things that make Onshape ideal for the PIB community project. One is everyone can access it easily. Onshape is the only professional-level CAD and PDM system that is truly cloud native – it runs in any web browser, even on any mobile phone or tablet. What that means is everyone on the team can get access to it instantly.

The models, drawings, product specifications and other information in the Onshape document can all be shared in real time with everybody. There’s no copying, there’s no “Who’s got the latest version?” – it’s shared in real time in a database. So that means that everyone can collaborate and see the up-to-date model, or they can go back to any previous state – there’s even branching and merging, like you see in collaborative software projects. So that’s point two, all the data shared in real time, no files, no copies.

Anyone on the team can fearlessly make changes and explore design ideas without worrying about overwriting each other’s work, without worrying about messing up the system. Because again, change is built into the fabric. We have a next-generation approach to PDM, to data management. And that means the team has opportunity for all this creativity while still having the data under control and management.

With the large number of contributors to this project, Onshape’s database-driven architecture comes into its own, since it allows you to track who’s done what to the various design files. The more people you have on the project, the more Onshape is valuable, because it tracks every edit that’s ever been made, who did it and when. Not every version of a file or an undo list or something, but every single edit. So you can see what people did and track it all. It makes it really easy for this kind of a project where lots of people are collaborating and you don’t have to worry about losing data. You just can’t do that with older file-based tools.

Thanks to Jon and to Jurgen for showing us PIB at isento’s headquarters.

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This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design, editing and recording by Ollie Guillou. And music by Rowan Bishop.