Inbolt Teaches Blind Robots To See

How Inbolt Is Teaching Blind Robots to See

SOSV portfolio company Inbolt, an alum of the SOSV HAX program, was profiled by The New York Times for beating a limitation that has slowed industrial automation for decades: most robots can't see. At a Stellantis plant in Detroit, a robot arm picking panels for Dodge Durangos and Jeep Cherokees kept freezing whenever a panel was slightly out of position, sometimes crashing outright. Inbolt added a compact camera and computing unit mounted on the robot's wrist, giving it the ability to recognize parts, judge their position, and adjust its movements in real time.

The appeal for Stellantis is that Inbolt upgrades the aging robots automakers already run, rather than requiring costly new machines with computer vision already built-in. Since its first deployment at a Stellantis plant in Hungary in 2024, Inbolt has been installed on more than 200 robots worldwide, including a sealant-applying robot whose nozzle used to snap off several times a shift and now rarely breaks. Inbolt's systems reportedly cut downtime by up to 95% and speed cycle times by 30%. With most of the world's 4.7 million industrial robots still operating blind, Inbolt has a shot at becoming the default upgrade path for an industry under pressure to automate faster than it can afford to replace its machines.