Robotiq + Pickit = industry collaboration that inspires

Øyvind Borgan
Zivid
Published in
2 min readOct 15, 2020

When Robotiq announced the alliance with Pickit to provide a “fast, reliable, and highly capable” bin-picking kit, we witnessed an inspiring moment of industrial cooperation. The takeaway:

When multidisciplinary expertise, experience, and know-how is necessary to solve a problem, collaborating beats competing.

A robot performs random 3D bin picking of sheet metal using Zivid + Pickit + Robotiq. Universal Robots and Zivid 3D camera

It’s a well-known “secret” that Pickit and Zivid joined forces in 2018 to accelerate the adoption of robotic 3D vision systems for SMEs. As a result, the Zivid One+ 3D camera is a native component in Pickit’s high-res M-HD solution. One observation and a crucial insight from our collaboration with Pickit, is realizing the validity of the initial statement above.

At Zivid we pride ourselves in being a pure-play 3D company: a team of engineers dedicated to building fast, accurate, industrial-grade 3D color cameras that solve fundamental challenges like “capture quality 3D data on highly reflective parts” and “absolute dimensional trueness.

The same goes for our friends at Pickit. Their dedicated team is equally focused on designing a disruptive pick & place solution with exceptional user-friendliness: bin-picking that just works.

I’m convinced that neither Pickit nor Zivid would have had the same success had we not continuously shared insights, experiences, expertise — and respectfully challenged each other over the last few years. Coming back to Robotiq’s announcement, we should acknowledge that realizing next-generation automation solutions depends on deep expertise in multiple technical domains. It is almost impossible to have a team that knows and masters all aspects of the goal of Universal Picking:

  • the arms (in this case: cobots from UR)
  • the hands (Robotiq’s grippers)
  • the eyes (Zivid’ 3D color cameras)
  • the brain (Pickit’s software solution)

I see this as a potential killer combo that very well can prove to the world that a) it’s better to be a company that tries to collaborate and learn it all, than being tricked into thinking one knows and master it all — and b) global business collaboration is a good thing.

Godspeed.

Mikkel Orheim
(Leading sales @ Zivid)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/robotiq-pickit-industry-collaboration-inspires-mikkel-orheim/

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