Numurus News

Understanding the Role of AI Middleware in Industrial Automation

ONLINE 06/07/2024, May 17, 2023

The recent article from A3, Guide to AI Middleware, delves into the transformative potential of AI middleware in industrial automation. AI middleware is a critical software layer that connects data sources, AI models, and automation systems, ensuring seamless data flow and efficient AI deployment. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of AI middleware, including its types, pros and cons, and real-world use cases demonstrating its value in various industrial applications. This guide highlights how with Numurus’ NEPI platform, companies can accelerates edge AI and robotic automation by enabling data connectivity to leverage the power of AI.

Numurus and NEPI: Driving Innovation in AI Middleware

Numurus, with its NEPI platform, plays a pivotal role in the AI middleware landscape. The NEPI platform offers a robust software toolset designed to accelerate the development of edge AI and robotic automation solutions. By providing ready-to-use interfaces, hardware drivers, ROS robotic interfaces, IoT connectivity, and data management tools, NEPI simplifies the complex process of AI integration for businesses of all sizes. This enables companies to quickly deploy AI solutions that enhance efficiency, safety, and decision-making in industrial environments.

Real-World Impact: Accelerating AI-Enabled Solutions

An excellent example of Numurus’ impact is their collaboration with a sonar vendor. Working with Numurus and two engineers, the sonar vendor swiftly developed an AI-enabled system and smartphone app that significantly improved their customers’ ability to find and catch more fish. This project highlights the practical benefits of AI middleware in solving real-world industrial challenges and underscores the value that Numurus and their NEPI platform bring to the table.

Numurus Joins NVIDIA Metropolis to Accelerate Industrial Edge-AI and Robotics Applications

SEATTLE, May 17, 2023

Numurus, a provider of NEPI^®, a fully-featured operating system (OS) for industrial edge-AI and robotics applications, today announced it has joined NVIDIA Metropolis, a partner program focused on bringing to market a new generation of vision AI applications. The program nurtures a rich ecosystem and offers powerful developer tools to supercharge vision AI applications that are designed to make the world’s most important spaces and operations safer and more efficient.

Researchers and application solution providers spend up to 40% or more of their total software budget building and maintaining low-level software, drivers, and tools. This effort is non-core for most development teams but a required component of any smart system software stack. Providers face major challenges building low-level software with hard-to-find expertise, short timelines, small budgets, and the high effort of integrating and maintaining sensor drivers, control system interfaces, communications drivers, tools for managing AI at the edge, automation, and beyond. “Providers need to avoid this complex, costly approach and use a scalable path to meet and grow demand for industrial automation,” said Shanif Merchant, Numurus chief product officer.

Numurus, with its NEPI OS platform, off-the-shelf edge-compute hardware, and engineering services, is addressing these challenges. NEPI is the first commercial, open-source, turnkey OS with plug-and-play abstracted sensor and communication drivers, backseat robotic and manipulator interfaces, drag-and-drop AI and automation tools, and local and remote system and data management solutions that reduce costs and simplify smart system development.

NVIDIA Metropolis makes it easier and more cost effective for enterprises, governments, and integration partners to use world-class AI-enabled solutions to improve critical operational efficiency and safety problems. The NVIDIA Metropolis ecosystem contains a large and growing breadth of members who are investing in the most advanced AI techniques and most efficient deployment platforms, and using an enterprise-class approach to their solutions. Members can gain early access to NVIDIA platform updates to further enhance and accelerate their AI application development efforts. Further, the program offers the opportunity for members to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations.

Numurus incorporates NVIDIA CUDA-X software libraries, the JetPack development environment, Nsight developer tools, and Jetson system-on-modules within its product line. Future integration with the NVIDIA TAO Toolkit and DeepStream SDK will enable developers to build their AI models and manage datasets even more rapidly.

Numurus Solves a Critical AI Technology Gap with NEPI

Software for Robotic, Smart Sensing and Edge-AI Development

SEATTLE, February 6, 2022

Numurus, a leading provider of smart system solutions, today announced NEPI, the first commercially available, open-source software that solves a critical AI technology gap by offering smart solution developers a turnkey alternative to building low-level AI middleware in-house.

In today’s smart solution development landscape many companies build the same low-level software as their competitors, creating a sea of disconnected software that provides little competitive advantage. The extra burden of developing low-level software increases the cost and time it takes developers to deliver mature, customer-ready smart solutions. Similar problems were at major technology revolutions like PCs and servers in the ‘90s and smartphones over a decade ago. Numurus is addressing the low-level software technology gap for AI enabled products with its flagship product NEPI, an open-source software distribution for robotic, smart sensing and Edge-AI applications, which will enable this rapidly growing market to reach its true potential across all industries.

Numurus’ NEPI smart system software integrates complex, disparate industry 4.0 technologies like advanced sensor and motor drivers, Edge-AI management tools, remote user interfaces, Internet-of-Things (IOT) communications, Robot Operating System (ROS) interfaces and other smart system technologies into one commercial software offering designed for embedded GPU processors like NVIDIA’s Jetson processor family. With NEPI, smart solution developers can bring products to market faster because they can bypass the development and integration of these technologies that are necessary for a product ready solution. 

In addition to NEPI, Numurus also offers professional design services for deployment, customization and prototyping of NEPI-based solutions with engineers specialized in AI, robotics, and smart sensing. When combined with the NEPI software package, Numurus’ professional services staff can help customers resolve issues quickly, reduce risk and create smart products faster.

“By choosing NEPI, smart solution developers can leverage our 5-year development investment and speed up the delivery of their own innovations. Never before has there been an open-source, commercial software offering created exclusively for robotic, smart sensing and Edge-AI applications. We look forward to speaking with customers about their smart product development challenges and the powerful capabilities NEPI provides in helping them achieve industry 4.0 transformation,” said Numurus chief product officer Shanif Merchant.

Launch customer WESMAR, an Inov8v Marine Group Company, chose NEPI and Numurus professional services team to accelerate their sonar product line modernization efforts and to reduce their need to hire additional engineers in an already tight labor market. Within 5 months of starting their NEPI-enabled sonar project, WESMAR successfully demonstrated its next-generation smart sonar product to customers and produced ready-to-ship production systems. 

“Wesmar was able to demonstrate and deliver smart sonar sensors to our customers within 5 months with NEPI software and Numurus professional services. They have gone above and beyond our expectations, and we are very pleased to have their support as we look to apply NEPI across our entire product line,” said Roger Fellows, president of Inov8v Marine Group.

Like WESMAR, many companies recognize that adding AI and IoT capabilities to their products can significantly increase customer value and provide competitive advantages in a growing commoditized environment. These companies also recognize they must get smart products to their customers fast. Yet, like WESMAR, they struggle with developing such solutions due to limited budgets and engineering resources. Numurus’ NEPI smart system software and professional services solves these problems by offering an alternative to proprietary, low-level software development, helping companies get their smart products to the market faster.

Numurus Places 3rd in Startup Network’s “Unicorn Battle Artificial Intelligence” NEPI Edge-AI Software Approach Recognized as Big Opportunity and Excellent Long-Term Play

SEATTLE, December 2, 2022

Numurus is pleased to announce it was a Top 3 Finisher in Startup Network’s Unicorn Battle, Artificial Intelligence (AI) that took place on November 17th, 2022 in a world-wide virtual presentation. Numurus CEO Jason Seawall presented NEPI, an open-source Linux software distribution for robotic, smart sensing and Edge-AI applications, to a panel of over 40 international investors.

Unicorn Battle AI is one of many Startup Network’s pitch contests where international venture capitalists and business angel investors meet extraordinary startups like Numurus. Numurus competed with ten other pre-selected companies for the opportunity to advance to the final round. As the first company to present, CEO Jason Seawall spoke about the middleware challenges robot, sensor and AI developers face, namely that middleware requires a lot of very specialized, complex and disparate software components which takes a lot of development time and cost to create. Seawall said that the Numurus’ NEPI is the solution to these challenges. He also highlighted NEPI as a key enabler for bringing Edge-AI and robotic solutions to market faster.  After the event, Mr. Seawall said, “The opportunity to pitch Numurus was most welcome. I was thrilled to place in the Top 3 and received a lot of great reaffirming feedback from the judges.”

The judges who are venture capitalists from all over the world awarded Numurus 3rd place. The company’s business and technology were validated by Judge Kelly Luo, Founder and Investor at Mans International, who said, “Numurus’ market size is very large and they are patent protected and have a very clear go to market strategy and healthy traction.” Judge Guarav Shah, Managing Partner at Arete Ventures said, “Numurus is an excellent long-term play. What they are trying to do and accomplish in this niche Edge-AI space is really hitting a spot. I think they have a potential to do very well from hereon.”

Watch live recorded Unicorn-Battle AI here.

Learn more about NEPI here.   

Read NEPI customer success story here.

Numurus Secures $2 Million to Grow Its Open-Source Robotic Applications Software Business

SEATTLE, October 25, 2022

Numurus, a leading robotic solutions company and developer of NEPI, the first commercial open-source software solution for robotic and smart sensing applications, has secured $2 million in funding led by Tokusui Corporation of America Inc. to establish its position in the rapidly growing robotics and smart sensing markets. Combined with previous funding, this investment fortifies Numurus’ first-to-market entrance with its fully-developed NEPI software suite that focuses on edge artificial intelligence (Edge AI), sensor and data abstraction, and system interfacing.

In support of its efforts, Numurus has formed a board of directors to provide continued strategic vision and executive leadership as the company enters a rapid growth phase over the next year. The board members include Numurus CEO Jason Seawall, and Ryan Mackey and Jonathan Doran representing the current investment groups. This investment also supports the expansion of Numurus’ product development and professional service divisions – central to the company’s commitment to delivering scalable Edge AI focused products and support to its customers. As a strong demonstration of that commitment, Numurus recently hired industry veteran Shanif Merchant, chief product officer, to oversee NEPI product evolution and accelerate Numurus’ place as a leading solution provider in the 4th industrial revolution. Lastly, the new funding will assist Numurus with increased market development efforts and more global customer reach.

Numurus CEO, Jason Seawall said, “Numurus intends to become a ubiquitous underlying platform for robotic and smart sensor solutions by significantly reducing the development costs and time to market for new products in this industry, overcoming a major obstacle in market scalability of such solutions. Through Tokusui Corporation’s investment and support, we are well positioned to execute this vision.” 

Tokusui Corporation of America President Ryan Mackey said, “After seeing first-hand how Industry 4.0 technologies such as AI, IoT, and robotics were rapidly changing Tokusui’s worldwide food processing businesses, Tokusui sees the broader impact these technologies will have across most industrial markets and believes that Numurus’ NEPI software suite will be a major driver of transformation in these industries.” 

Prior to the Tokusui investment, Numurus secured funding from individual investors who had also invested in Mr. Seawall’s previous company BlueView Technologies, which was acquired by Teledyne Technologies in 2012.

Numurus Leverages Evolute Container Platform to Power its NEPI Remote Software Management Solution

Customers can deploy NEPI software across an entire fleet in minutes instead of months

SEATTLE, September 30, 2020

Numurus, a provider of Industry 4.0 solutions for industrial and defense smart sensors, announced today it is partnering with Santa Clara, CA-based Evolute, an edge computing platform, to leverage its Evolute Migrate solution to rapidly containerize and provision Edge deployable software devices over the Numurus Edge Platform Interface (NEPI).  NEPI is an Industry 4.0 smart sensor ecosystem that offers capabilities sensor manufacturers need to rapidly integrate Industry 4.0 functionality within their product offerings.  

“Manually moving a legacy application and all its dependencies to a container has typically taken three-to-six months per application.  With Evolute, customers will be able to streamline provisioning of NEPI software from months to minutes and deploy these solutions across their entire fleet with a single button press,” explained Numurus CEO and Founder Jason Seawall.   “It will save them up to $25,000 in development and deployment costs,” he added.

With the Evolute Migrate capability, applications can be moved to a container environment allowing Numurus to have a single container for its deployments.  NEPI product development customers can quickly populate a Cloud hosted library of Edge software solutions that their end customers can access and deploy seamlessly from a Cloud environment for mission and operation specific applications.  

“With its secure smart IoT backbone, Edge-software management tools, user portal customization, and integrated Cloud-services, NEPI is a perfect application for the Evolute Platform,” said Evolute Founder and CEO Kristopher Francisco.  “Enterprise adoption of container platforms is slow—especially for larger organizations with legacy systems. As a result, container technology isn’t prioritized properly. That’s a mistake. All large companies work to streamline operations, and the best way to achieve greater operating efficiency requires the adoption and native deployment of containers.  With Evolute, NEPI bridges that gap with an automated container platform that removes concerns over networking, security, and reliability.” 

NEPI Background

NEPI is a subscription platform for enabling Cloud-based data, software, and AI management in smart sensors.  With NEPI, product developers can rapidly transform their sensor and robotic technologies into smart IoT enabled solutions making them both more capable and more valuable to the end customer.  NEPI customers include smart sensor developers, manufactures, and operators.

One of the key capabilities of the NEPI smart device software platform is the ability to manage smart device software through a Cloud-hosted Edge configuration Portal, allowing end-users to select one or multiple smart devices from their fleet and deploy Edge-software from a library of NEPI compatible software with a single button press. NEPI also provides a behind the scenes digital-twin system that documents all software and configuration updates for each device.  

About Evolute

Evolute offers a highly scalable container platform with cloud migration. With Evolute, a company can take any application an enterprise is currently supporting and migrate it into a container environment. The Evolute platform analyzes, migrates, and produces the necessary processes to move entire systems from previous environments (i.e., virtual machines, bare metal, or in a cloud environment) to Linux Containers allowing software to run on their edge platform automatically. Evolute’s platform provides container infrastructure and introduces native storage and management to support legacy applications’ streamlined deployment to edge and container environments.

DARPA Selects Numurus’ Smart Inspection Ecosystem for Ocean Monitoring Program 

Numurus’ Edge IoT Solutions Enable Ocean Observations on a Scale Never Achieved Before

SEATTLE, June 6, 2020

Numurus has won a contract from DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office to integrate its Smart Inspection Ecosystem into thousands of satellite connected remote monitoring devices. While several programs over the past decade have measured the ocean environment on a large scale (>10 km), the Ocean of Things (OoT) program will provide measurements that are orders of magnitude finer (<10m). Potential applications include more accurate fish population estimation, oil spill monitoring, improved weather forecasting, and better tsunami prediction models. To achieve the OoT program goals, DARPA will leverage Numurus’ SB-SDK™ Edge software and NEPI™ Smart IoT management platforms. These tools together produce a full-spectrum sensor-to-cloud solution capable of detecting minor changes in the environment, reducing megabytes of sensor data into kilobytes of information at the collection source, and transmitting that information through Iridium satellites to a secure firewalled cloud infrastructure. Through NEPI’s fleet level monitoring and software management solutions, DARPA can access data products, tweak mission configurations, and apply software updates to deployed smart devices. Outside of the marine environment, the technology advances developed under this program are immediately applicable to many challenging problems such as measuring ice sheet thickness and permafrost across remote areas of the world or search and rescue operations in mountainous and dense forested environments.

“The Ocean of Things program is a great opportunity to advance Numurus’ vision of providing management solutions for fleets of remote smart devices and robotic inspection solutions”, said Jason Seawall, CEO of Numurus. “Not only is this program advancing our Edge software and Cloud management capabilities, it is significantly increasing the content of our Edge software marketplace with a library of new ROS processing modules.”

Numurus Joins The 5G Open Innovation Lab

Furthering Innovation of 5G Technologies for Industrial and Defense Robotics

SEATTLE, May 19, 2020

Numurus announced today that it has joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab (5G OI Lab), an ecosystem for developers, solutions providers, carriers and technology leaders, focused on helping start-ups utilize 5G to develop new robotic inspection and maintenance capabilities. Numurus will work closely with the Lab’s founding partners including Intel, T-Mobile and others to help develop and deploy 5G solutions by giving access to engineering, technology and industry insights.

Numurus will leverage the Lab’s combined knowledge, resources, and connections to drive 5G capability development in their flagship NEPI^® product, a smart IoT platform for managing data software and AI between Edge-devices and Cloud-services. As a turnkey secure connectivity solution, NEPI enhances robotic inspection and maintenance activities through advanced IoT interface technologies such as 5G.With support from the 5GOI Lab and its partners, Numurus will continue to expand their NEPI technology and applications around 5G capabilities.

“Being a part of the 5G OI Lab and working with 5G technology leaders is a very exciting opportunity for Numurus to further its vision of supporting next generation inspection and maintenance robots,” said Numurus CEO, Jason Seawall. “The integration of 5G capabilities will have immediate applications with many of the organizations we support”.

“The 5G OI Lab is an extraordinary opportunity for developers to work directly with technology and business leaders to design and bring to life their vision and dreams for new 5G applications,” said Jim Brisimitzis, managing partner of the 5G OI Lab. “We are building a true partner ecosystem that will bring knowledge, resources and capital together to change the world in profound ways.”

About the 5G Open Innovation Lab

The 5G Open Innovation Lab (5G OI Lab) is a global ecosystem of developers, start-ups, enterprises, academia and government institutions working together with start-ups to fuel the development of new 5G capabilities and market categories that will transform the way we work, live and play both now and in the future. The Lab provides developers at all stages unparalleled access to open platforms, enterprises and markets needed to create, test and deploy new use cases and innovations for 5G. To learn more about the Lab and its portfolio of companies, please visit https://www.5GOILab.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @5GOILab.

Numurus Partners with PickNik to Deliver Edge Device Resident User Interfaces

Providing Numurus’ Smart Device Customers with a Common System Monitoring and Management Solution

SEATTLE, October 15, 2018

In another step toward simplifying the development and management of smart inspection systems, Numurus has teamed up with PickNik Robotics to create a Resident UI solution Smart Device Platforms (SDP). Numurus’ SDPs communicate natively using the ROS (Robot Operating System)framework. As a result of this collaboration each device will now come equipped with a Resident UI that provides a built-in ROS web server portal for system monitoring and management. This portal will be accessible through any network connected computer, tablet, or smartphone. In addition to simplifying the user experience through a common user experience and simplifying in-field accessibility, the interface’s scalable architecture will allow for rapidly customizable solutions for a wide range of applications. Numurus selected PickNik, a ROS software development firm, based on their unique combination of ROS and user experience expertise. Together, we are building a technically solid solution while defining a new standard in smart device management interfaces. The new RUI solution will possess several features including a dashboard for status and control, ability to access files, metadata, manuals and data, security settings, and the ability to configure modular based applications directly on the sensors. PickNik’s ability to provide ongoing B2B customization support for Numurus and its OEM customers make them the ideal partner and will enable tailoring a device’s RUI to provide optimized solutions for particular applications such as automated tank inspection or manipulator automation. 

“We are delighted to find a company able to support our vision of a next generation user experience for smart sensors and robotic solutions.”, said Jason Seawall, CEO of Numurus. “This partnership will also significantly expand customization resources for both Numurus and its OEM customers, setting a new level of smart device adaptability and optimization for specific missions and applications.”

“We’re excited to be collaborating with Numurus on this ROS initiative and opening new doors.” Said CEO, Dave Coleman. “More and more companies are taking note of the flexibility and customization that ROS offers”.