Standard Bots, America’s largest manufacturer of AI-native industrial robots, today launched its new AI platform with three skills—Agent, Locate, and Inspect—that enable frontline workers to program a robot to do complex tasks in minutes from an iPad, with no code, no fixtures, and no outside integrator.

Nearly 200,000 of America’s 240,000 manufacturers have fewer than 20 employees, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, and the industry could need 3.8 million new workers by 2033, with 1.9 million of those jobs at risk of going unfilled, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute. Robots offer a key opportunity for manufacturers to meet rising demand amid labor shortages while also improving safety standards for frontline workers. Yet only 6% of U.S. manufacturers use robots today.

Evan Beard, Co-Founder and CEO of Standard Bots, said: “Until recently, robots have been dumb and brittle. They’ve been expensive to install and service, required third-party consultants to hard-code every motion, and still couldn’t do that much. Standard Bots AI is changing all of that. Manufacturing workers can automate tasks just by prompting their robot to make a routine and learn from simple demonstrations. Standard Bots deploy and pay back twice as fast as the industry standard. Our mission is to enhance human capacity with the world’s most accessible robots.”

Agent: Build and change routines by prompt, not code

Agent is a Standard Bots AI skill you talk to. Tell it what you want your robot to do, and it builds the routine for you. Trained on Standard Bots’ user manuals and best practices, Agent responds to prompts like “Build me a machine tending routine” by asking about your setup and then building the program with you, much as ChatGPT or Claude does for digital work.

With Agent, operators can describe the task at hand and deploy a working program fast. No software or robotics experience required.

Locate: Just tap or type what to look for, and it remembers

Locate cuts out the most tedious steps of programming robots. Instead of painstakingly defining exact coordinates by hand for multiple joints across multiple waypoints in your routine, operators just tap anything you see through the robot’s video feed (or describe it in text), and the robot can locate, track, and move around it autonomously. Routine setup is faster, and you don’t have to spend time on fixturing or part presentation—you just roll your parts over from upstream processes, and go.

Locate cuts down programming time by 90% because operators no longer have to dial in a grid of waypoints. This opens up high-mix work, where the parts on the line keep changing constantly. Changeover is trivial for a human but has been prohibitive for legacy robots because, until now, change meant painful reprogramming and re-fixturing. Now you can just ask Standard Bots AI to locate the new parts, and you’re done. This empowers the world’s largest companies and the smallest single-person job shops that run 25 different parts a day on a single machine.

Inspect: Catch defects in real-time with ease

Inspect helps to catch defects on your parts. It uses custom vision models trained on your parts to find flaws like scratches, including subtle ones that are hard to see with the naked eye. Developed in partnership with Roboflow, operators can natively load their custom inspection models into the Standard Bots platform for use in their routines. The robot scans your part surfaces and flags any defect it finds. You can either bring in your team or let the robot handle what it sees on its own.

Inspect adds automated quality checks in-line or at a dedicated station without hiring a machine vision expert. Setting up a custom model is fast and simple.

Expanding human capacity with the world’s most accessible robots

Leif Jentoft, Head of Applied AI at Standard Bots, said: “You used to have to hire an integrator; it costs a million dollars. You spend months dialing it in. And when something breaks in the middle of the night, you can’t fix it yourself. It’s like a literal black box on your own shop floor. With Standard Bots AI, you don’t have to program every position or keep track of where you are in a routine. You simply show your robot what you want it to do, and it will adapt to higher-mix tasks with simpler, more reliable programs.”

Customers can bring their own models rather than being locked into one vendor’s stack. Standard Bots is also developing its own foundation models.

Adrian Nistler, President and CEO of Path Machining Automation, a contract machining company in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, said: “We chose Standard Bots for two reasons: the speed of development is highly compressed, and the interface for programming the robot is so much simpler. With Standard Bots AI, that’s even faster. This is a big thing for American manufacturing because we can actually compete. Quality’s improved, on-time delivery is improved, and price competitiveness is improved.”

Standard Bots AI is available today at www.standardbots.com.

About Standard Bots

Standard Bots is America’s largest manufacturer of AI-native industrial robots. Full-stack robots—hardware, software, and AI—all designed and assembled in Glen Cove, New York. The company makes AI-native robots anyone can buy and deploy, with customers ranging from family-owned machine shops to the Fortune 500. Customers include Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the U.S. Army, along with hundreds of manufacturers nationwide. Standard Bots raised a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by RoboStrategy, with participation from General Catalyst, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, and Samsung Next. Learn more at standardbots.com.

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