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 (read here). The takeaway:
When multidisciplinary expertise, experience, and know-how is necessary to solve a problem, collaborating beats competing.
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:
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.